I love Star Trek. Actually, I should rephrase that. I love Star Trek the way I love America, my wife and child, and breathing. I have a drawing of the U.S.S. Enterprise I made in nursery school, fer Pete's sake. My frat brothers and I dressed as the original crew for Halloween when I was in college, and I named my three cats First of Three, Second of Three, and Third of Three. I love Star Trek, OK? All of which makes this as hard for me to write as anything I've ever written.

Star Trek must die.

Not permanently, of course. More in that "Search for Spock" kind of way where Leonard Nimoy takes a couple of years off and then is forced to come back when fan demand grows so intense that Paramount is forced to back a truckload of money up to his house. Put simply, Star Trek is a cash cow that's been nearly bled white by Paramount for so many years, I'm starting to think it's using Borg technology to keep the thing alive and kicking. I'm talking about an enforced period of hiatus where there will be no new television shows, no new movies, and no new video games for a period of let's say, ten years. Give us a big farewell 40th anniversary tour in 2006 when Enterprise goes off the air and then nothing until 2016 for the original series' 50th.

I don't think it's a surprise to anyone who's followed the franchise for any length of time that Star Trek has been treading water creatively for quite some time. Consider that there was a lapse of 10 years between the end of the original series and the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979. It was 20 years after the first season of the original that we got Next Generation, the show that not only equaled, but, quite frankly, surpassed the original in almost every respect. Unfortunately, after reaching that creative height, the franchise started to head downhill. The next series, Deep Space Nine hit the airwaves while Next Generation still had two years to run -- the same thing for Voyager and Enterprise -- to say nothing of the movies we've been subjected to like clockwork every two or three years. Like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, each generation removed from the original has become creatively weaker.

To a large extent, Star Trek has become the victim of its own success. When the show was on the air in the '60s, science fiction was a desert -- now we've got an entire cable channel dedicated to it. It stopped being special and just became one more product to consume in a 1,000 channel universe glutted with "sci-fi" that's little more than action movie explosions with rubber monsters and laser guns. Many of the later Trek movies and TV shows have tried to compete in this arena, only to be blown away by franchises like Aliens that are much better at it because they were designed around these concepts.

For all that Kirk used to get in a fist fight every other episode, Star Trek was never about laser gun battles or kicking alien butt. Star Trek was a throwback to science fiction as the "literature of ideas". I love Star Wars, but all the philosophizing in the world about the nature of the Force can't hold a candle to the real technological and social issues addressed in some of the best episodes of the show. I chewed for weeks on the questions of what it means to be human posed by Commander Data, I wrestled along with Captain Kirk about the nature of good and evil when he was split into his "light" and "dark" halves, and -- extremely relevant to these times -- there's a brilliant portrayal of terrorism and its costs in the performance of Nana Visitor as reformed terrorist Kira Nerys on Deep Space Nine.